Just in time for the second half of this season’s Empire, a new lawsuit has been filed against Fox’s hit show.
Sophie Eggleston, who claims that Cookie Lyon’s character was based on her 2009 autobiography, The Hidden Hand, recently hired lawyers to help sue the show’s co-creators Lee Daniels and Danny Strong. In 2015, Eggleston filed her own papers in court, but now has proper representation.
According to her new attorney, Tom Heed, the one-time Detroit drug kingpin wants for Daniels & Company to pay her a whopping $300 million for jacking her story without her consent and without retribution, Page Six reported.
But how similar are their stories?
Well according to the lawsuit, like Cookie, Eggleston too did jail time for ordering a “hit” on a man and “running a drug ring” and has a gay son similar to the show’s character, Jamal Lyon. Heed also wrote that Eggleston and Cookie also share a “love of flashy clothes and feather boas.” And according to Page Six, Heed believes they have a strong case.
“What she believes is that the character of herself, especially before she went to prison, as it was expressed in the book The Hidden Hand, was pretty much cribbed in total and that is now the character Cookie Lyon,” he said.
Eggleston also claims that in 2011 she met with a screenwriter in Los Angeles about turning her autobiography into a project that would be later pitched to Daniels. And while that meeting with Daniels may or may not have happened, the show Empire did, minus any collaboration with Eggleston.
This isn’t the first time Empire been accused of stealing someone’s personal story for personal gain. Last year, former pimp Ron Newt filed a billion dollar lawsuit against Terrence Howard and Daniels. That case is still ongoing, TMZ wrote.
We wonder what does Taraji has to say about all of this.
